


find what you love and let it kill you

by matsinko



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: (idek), Abuse of Metaphors, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Red String of Fate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2016-09-22
Packaged: 2018-08-16 17:08:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8110564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matsinko/pseuds/matsinko
Summary: Bits and pieces of Hajime and Tooru throughout the years.





	

Hajime is 4 years old when he meets 4-year-old Tooru, a tiny ball of shyness with blushing cheeks, hiding behind his mom’s skirt, mistrustful like a cat. His hair falls softly around his shoulders in light brown curls and his eyes glisten with nervous reserve.

“Mom, is Tooru a boy or a girl?” Hajime asks the same night, curious.

“He is a boy, baby, just like you,” his mom answers gently rocking him back and forward in her arms.

Hajime gasps, makes a small sound of fascination, “He’s so pretty. Maybe he’s both!”

“Maybe,” his mom agrees, voice carrying a note of frisky cheerfulness.

 

*

 

Hajime is 6 years old and has a best friend - a 6-year-old Tooru. For as much time it took Tooru to warm up to him, he is twice as clingy, always by Hajime’s side—laughing, playing, exploring together, joined at the hip _._  

The thing is though, Tooru cries a lot. He cries when he’s overwhelmed, when he’s tired, when he falls down and scrapes his knees, but most often he cries when the sun sets and Hajime needs to go home.

Hajime hates seeing Tooru cry. He calls him a big baby, but he’s always there to help - he protects him, he takes care of him when he falls, he carries him home when he’s tired. And even if he won’t admit it, he is happy like that, even a bit proud, because the truth is - Hajime is the _only one_ who can make Tooru stop crying. He can deal with him when he’s sad, when he’s angry, when he is frustrated. It makes him oddly content. He reasons it must be because Tooru is his best friend and their time together is a precious whirlwind of memories he wants to keep forever.

“I’m so sorry for him,” Tooru’s mom says as she brings Tooru to the Iwaizumi’s house the same evening for yet another sleepover, “he likes your Hajime-chan quite a lot,” she adds and laughs along with Hajime’s mom.

 

*

 

By the end of elementary school, Tooru stops crying as much. He grows a bit taller, his mom cuts his hair shorter and when other kids approach him, he doesn’t hide behind Hajime anymore.

He smiles a lot, wide and happy, chocolate eyes bright with boyish charm. 

So, Hajime isn’t really surprised _when he sees_ as he sees a girl approaching Tooru one day, pink blush dusting her cheeks.

“Oikawa-kun, do you wanna play softball with us after school?” She asks.

“Sorry, we have volleyball,” Hajime intervenes before Tooru has a chance to reply. They don’t.

“Would you practice more with me?” Tooru beams and throws himself on Hajime, “Iwa-chan!” 

Hajime feels a bit guilty until they start tossing the ball to each other, and he forgets about it just like that.

 

*

 

“Hey, Iwa-chan,” Tooru murmurs, voice soft as summer air.

Their middle school graduation ceremony behind their backs and a heavy medal around Tooru’s neck, a secure choice of high school and a knowing smile; a red thread somewhere in the corners of their reveries, slowly sewing seams together, sinks under their skins, slow but steady, and flows like lifeblood in their veins.

Hajime hums in response.

“I wanna be with Iwa-chan forever.” Tooru says and blushes, deep cherry red colouring along the cheeks of his face.

Hajime stares, suddenly at loss of words.

It is probably not the fist time Hajime thinks Tooru is beautiful but it is the very first time he feels it with his body; a warm feeling tickles underneath his skin, unsettles his stomach, settles in-between his bones and makes home right next to his heart.

He doesn’t answer, which he’ll later learn to regret.

 

*

 

It’s in their second year of high school that Hajime feels what fear is like at its rawest. And all it takes is a phone call and Hajime can physically feel the increase of his pulse in his throat, the cold, wrecking pause the world makes and for a second everything stops at its place—the tiny dust particles in the air, his heart in his chest—and all he hears is the fall of tears and painful whimpering and, “Iwa-chan, my knee—”

“Where are you? I’m coming right away.”

It is after Tooru is sent home with a month ban on practice and two more months ban on intensive training when the sleepovers from elementary school return full force. It happens with a firm hold on Hajime’s sleeve the first night after the incident—no words really needed—that Hajime sighs, full and heavy, turns back around, lays next to Tooru and stays.

Tooru’s bed is too small - two growing boys, all long limbs and sharp angles, barely any space to turn, yet everything softens when the night falls and Tooru stops crying, when his breath evens out and his eyes are no longer glassy, when his hands drift up and around Hajime’s body, mellowed-out and oh so gentle. There is pain, but there is also tenderness in the way souls and bodies heal; it is in the way Tooru feels so warm, so  _present_  when he presses closer, in the way his fingers trace slow, warm patterns on Hajime’s skin, cracks coming together, another piece of a puzzle takes its place.

It takes Tooru 27 days until he smiles again and when he does it’s directed at Hajime.

“Thank you, Iwa-chan.”

 

*

 

Hajime is 18 years old when his best friends stand hand in hand before him, with smiles so stupidly happy it’s contagious.

“Mattsun, Makki-chan!” Oikawa chirps, “Your captain is so happy for you!”

There is another feeling aside from joy deep in Hajime’s chest and a stab of pain colouring his voice as he congratulates. 

It’s jealousy.

 

*

 

It is a feeling quick to dissipate, making space for happiness entirely and wholeheartedly so, as one year later he gets a call with a request for being a best man and a wedding date, scribbled in his diary.

 

*

 

As the sun dips low, colouring the sky in hues of pink and orange and the music carrying from the reception gently fills the space between two bodies, unsaid words tug on fragile thread, a fading colour, once bright red.

“Iwa-chan.”

“Hmm.”

“I want to be with you forever.”

“Forever is a long time.”

“Don’t you love me, Iwa-chan?”

“We’re not kids anymore.”

Tooru takes this as a no.

 

*

 

The thing is Hajime is selfish—selfish  _and_  greedy—and the kind of love he wants is  _all of it_.

A friend’s love is a sole throb like a silhouette of love, painful in his chest, and he reaches, reaches, reaches...

(He’s afraid he’ll fall.)

 

*

 

The next day he gets a single text message. It’s from Hanamaki. 

> Iwaizumi, what the hell?

He doesn’t answer.

 

*

 

They’re into their second year of university when Tooru gets a girlfriend; a girl that Hajime learns to remember this time around; he learns her name, and face, and even the tone of her voice when she tells him she loves him.

It’s in their second year of university that Hajime cries for the very first time, under two layers of blankets and a thousand layers of heartbreak. It is then that he learns to chew on words he should never utter, to swallow feelings he shouldn’t feel and to throw up bitterness until his throat bleeds.

 

*

 

Hajime is 23 years old when he finds Tooru, sitting on the old couch in their little shared apartment, suit clinging to his strong body, tie in disarray. A quick look at the wall clock tells Hajime Tooru is home early. 

Perplexity looks good on him, he decides then, raw and honest from the crease between his eyebrows to the way his lips curl downward. He is like a painting, Hajime muses—curious and captivating—and Hajime—well, he doesn’t know anything about art.

“She wants to get married,” Tooru says and everything that follows is white noise in Hajime’s head, he doesn’t hear a thing. He just stares right back at Tooru’s eyes, melted chocolate, the kind that burns your tongue and leaves you unable to taste a damn thing after. 

“Hajime?”

It’s just Tooru on his tongue and Hajime wonders if he will ever be able to taste anything else.

 

*

 

It is a day later when Tooru tells him he left her. That he couldn’t lie to himself anymore. That every time he kisses her, he thinks of someone else. Words spill from angry lips like rushing water but all that reaches Hajime is ‘ _someone else_ ’ - it rings in his ears like a shrill echo, someone else, someone else but not him.

 _Ah, let him kill you_ , Hajime thinks.

 _Find what you love and let it kill you_.

 

*

 

Life gets better after, easier. Hajime learns to breath again, a breath at a time and Tooru finds that string of silk again, faded red, unseamed and crumbled, and gently ties it back, a tiny ribbon on Hajime’s pinky finger until it sinks back into his skin, down to his bones, and back around his heart.

It feels painfully alike their high school days, Hajime thinks as they lay together on the couch, limbs like spider webs around each other and a shitty alien movie playing on Tooru’s laptop.

 

*

 

Hajime is 24 year old and fresh into his first job. And he meets her then, at his very first team building party - she has soft brown hair, sharp as knifes eyes and puckered lips, curling upwards like she  _knows_. She is a striking copy, a well moulded image, burnt into his very soul, oh so familiar, and as he fucks her into his sheets the same night, wet and loud and uncaring, he needs to bite his tongue until it bleeds just so he won’t come with  _his_  names on his lips.

 

*

 

It is the next day that he gets his first split lip, courtesy to Tooru. 

He is a summer storm with wildfire bleeding from his eyes, burning brands over Hajime’s very soul.

(It burns stronger than his fist)

“Are you fucking with me?” he yells and the anguish in his voice hits Hajime right in the gut, “I—for you,” the anger in his voice wells over in palpable waves and the words that come sound nothing like coherent, “just stop giving the wrong signals, you utter dickhead.”

He leaves Hajime standing there, dumbfounded.

 

*

 

Tooru moves to stay with Hanamaki and Matsukawa and the small apartment feels so empty, the hollowness almost palpable weight on Hajime’s shoulders.

His phone gets flooded with messages and missed calls. It takes him 8 hours until he gathers enough resolve to look.

> _Missed call, Hanamaki (2)_
> 
> **From: Hanamaki**
> 
> Seriously, Iwaizumi, what the hell?
> 
> **From: Hanamaki**  
> 
> I don’t mean to be rude, but you two are the biggest idiots ever. 
> 
> _Missed call, Matsukawa (3)_
> 
> **From: Hanamaki**
> 
> Just tell him how you feel, ffs.
> 
> **From: Matsukawa**
> 
> Are you okay?
> 
> **From: Matsukawa**
> 
> Hiro is blunt, but he’s right you know. 

His fingers still on his phone. No, it can’t be.

He can almost feel fate laughing at him, cold and mocking.

A lost piece of a puzzle, found underneath the old couch, discoloured and ugly and as it finds its place on the incomplete picture of two boys’ lives, he can see it - everything slows, the world stops spinning, soft silk thread tugs on his pinky finger, an ugly little thing, but obstinate, fearless. And everything becomes clear.

 

*

 

The phone rings, once, twice, three times...

“Oh god, I thought you were dead! _”_ ”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise”

“Matsukawa, is he still there?”

“Yeah, he is.”

“Is he—”

“He’s not okay.”

“I’m coming to get him, okay?”

“Okay.”

 

*

 

How easy is to complete the puzzle when there is just one piece missing, how difficult it is to breath when what it completes is what takes all your breath away. 

Hajime’s pulse drums and drums in his ears, his mind filled with cotton, his body weightless, his blood like rushing water, hot—no  _boiling—_ in his veins as he presses Tooru agains the bed, naked thighs sliding together in a perfect harmony and a steady pressure building low in his abdomen. Damp breaths, warm against the flush of Hajime’s shoulders and sugar-sweet moans spilling from parted lips and  _oh_ , it’s everything he’s ever wanted and  _so much more_.

 

*

 

“Iwa-chan, do you love me?”

“Very much.”

“I love you, too!"

 

*

 

“I don’t know what it’s like not loving you, you idiot.”

 

*

 

Hajime is 29 years old when he gets his first panic attack. And Matsukawa is there, putting the small, velvet box back into his palm, a soothing hand on his back, a soft smile on his face.

“Good god, Iwaizumi, you’re overthinking,” Matsukawa says. 

“It’s always been the two of you, you know,” he speaks again and his hand stills on Hajime’s back, “Oikawa and Iwaizumi, Iwaizumi and Oikawa. You two had your own little world with fences so high Hanamaki and I never really managed to cross. And that’s okay, because you got lucky - you found a person to share a world with when you could barely speak.” Matsukawa laughs then, a small warm sound that soothes Hajime’s nerves.

“Hiro thought you two are going to get married in high school and elope or something,” he adds, “so have no fear, he wants this is much as you do.”

Hajime looks up, half convinced and full of gentle gratefulness for this friendship. 

“But hey, youowe us at least 15 free dinners and 10 sleepovers with movies chosen by Hiro and I, no less. Jesus, it took you two long enough.”

 

*

 

Hajime is 29 years old when Tooru says yes and they promise their lives to each other. 

A thread of silk, bright red, a ribbon on his pinky finger

Constellations woven underneath his skin, silvery and golden.

Happiness around his heart, lullabies of love between his bones.

It’s everything he’s ever wanted.

And yet so much more.

**Author's Note:**

> When combined, Hajime and Tooru form "一徹" meaning "obstinate" or "dauntless".
> 
>  
> 
> [(my tumblr)](http://matsinko.tumblr.com)


End file.
